The Twilight Swimmer (36 page)

“You loved her,” she said, angry tears streaming down her face.

“Yes.”

“What a joke.”

Dallas glared at her. She glared back.

He looked away first, a small victory for Brandi, but he gave her a hard shove to move her into the center of the warehouse. There on the floor was the charred remains of the bonfire that had spread so quickly the night she first saw the Swimmer, the night he rose out of the water and ran into the smoke and flame to rescue Kelly from a sleeping death.

“They’ll be able to trace the bullet back to your gun, won’t they?”

“I’m not using the gun.”

“They’ll find other evidence you were here. A hair. A strand of fabric from your uniform.”

“Stop talking, Brandi.”

“I’ll make sure I get some of your skin under my fingernails. I’ll make sure of it. How will you explain that? How will you explain that the tire tracks in the gravel lot match your truck. That your footprints are outside the building. No one will believe they’re left over from the fire. It’s rained a dozen times since then.”

She didn’t see his hand rushing toward her cheek until it was already upon her, the blow sufficient to knock her off her feet. She landed on her hip and slid through a layer of black ash on the hard warehouse floor.

“Wrong, Brandi. In an hour, maybe less, I’ll get a call from the sheriff that you never came home last night. We’ll start searching for you. Your father will search the water, expecting to find you where they found Jenny. But me? I’ll drive inland. I’ll end up out here, at the warehouse. Leaving tire tracks. Leaving footprints. Then I’ll find your body lying right there, in the ash. I’ll run to you, because we’re friends, hoping that you’re still alive. If you scratch me, it will be from me moving your body. I’ll call an ambulance, desperate, maybe even sobbing. And no one will suspect that the bruise on your cheek came from my hand.”

“Or the bruises on my neck. From your fingers.”

“I’m sorry, Brandi.”

Brandi started crawling. Through the ash, through the gray cinders littering the floor. The points of her elbows were grinding into the hard surface, sending bolts of pain up her arms. She ignored it. She kept crawling, working her slow, steady way toward the warehouse entrance. She could see through the open door that the sun had arrived, golden rays punching through the morning darkness and flooding into the building. More sunlight was pouring through massive holes rent in the ceiling where the fire had destroyed it. She crawled toward the exit, toward the light, pretending she couldn’t hear Dallas’s footsteps as he walked up behind her, watching her futile attempt at escape. Cracking his knuckles as he readied his hands for the final act.

Dallas bent over to grab her waistband, intent on hauling her back to her feet. And so he didn’t see what she saw. Not at first. He didn’t see the bare feet at the edge of the warehouse floor, the webbing between the toes, the beads of water streaming between them from bare legs.

Brandi looked up at the Swimmer just as Dallas’s hands locked tightly around her neck. He started to squeeze, and she felt her throat close. But she wasn’t afraid. She had gone without air before in the presence of the Swimmer. The pain was real, but she knew she was safe.

And then Dallas saw the Swimmer looming above him. He released Brandi and stumbled backward, desperately scrambling to liberate his gun from its holster. He slipped on the ash-covered floor and fell hard. The Swimmer stepped past Brandi and strode toward Dallas, his gait determined, his arms swinging wide as he closed the distance.

And before Brandi’s amazed eyes, the Swimmer
disappeared
.

Not entirely. There was still a distortion in the air where his body passed through it. But his camouflage was remarkable, as staggering now as it had been that night, in her bedroom, when her father nearly discovered the Swimmer leaning against her wall.

Brandi kept crawling through the warehouse exit. She looked back for a moment, and she saw the sunlight strike the Swimmer’s almost invisible back. She saw the almost invisible skin begin to sizzle angrily, saw it begin to burn. She saw Dallas drive himself backward, trying to regain his feet. She saw him rip the gun free of its holster, hands shaking violently as he fumbled with the hammer.

“No, no!” she cried out, her injured throat preventing the words from reaching the volume she intended.

“Go,” said the Swimmer, his disembodied voice calmly advancing on Dallas. She could hear no evidence in his voice that he felt the sunlight savaging his flesh from overhead.

Brandi crawled out of the warehouse and climbed to her knees. She stumbled away from the building, blinded by the harsh sunlight chasing away the last protection of the night sky.

A gunshot. The sound was amplified within the warehouse walls, reverberating like rolling thunder.

Brandi turned to look back through the door, but saw only the dark interior where the sunlight had not yet reached. She struggled to pull her feet free of the loose bindings that wrapped her ankles. She kicked off a shoe to pull her socked foot through then went to work with her teeth on the rubber tubing that bound her hands.

Another gunshot.

“No!” Brandi cried out.

And then she heard screams from within the warehouse. A male voice, so full of terror and anguish that it went high like the voice of a child crying out in the night, kicking the sheets, trapped in the grip of a nightmare.

Sobbing, breathing hard, Brandi kept working on the tubing. Her wrists were bleeding where friction and her own teeth had torn the skin. She didn’t care. She could hardly feel it. She kept digging, pulling, tearing.

Inside the warehouse, the screams devolved into something much more horrific. She could no longer hear humanity in the noises. Only desperation. Only pain. And with the vocalizing, she heard the thunderous crashing of bodyweight against the warehouse walls, against the floor. She heard a body breaking, a few bones at a time. Long after the screams had subsided, the violence inside the warehouse continued.

Brandi finally freed her hands. She climbed to her feet and scrambled toward the warehouse entrance, brushing aside her hair as it fell across her eyes. When she reached the entrance and stumbled inside, she slammed directly into him.

The Swimmer.

His chest was heaving. His mouth agape as he drew short, difficult breaths. Every inch of exposed flesh was pink from the sunlight, burned painfully. His shoulder was much darker red. Blood streamed from a wound at his clavicle, running down his arm and dripping from his hand. There was another splash of dark red blood at his naked waist.

Two gunshots. Two wounds.

The Swimmer fell against Brandi, far too heavy for her to support. They stumbled back out the warehouse door, landing in a shaft of caustic sunlight. The Swimmer’s flesh immediately began to smolder anew. He groaned at the pain, but was too weakened from his wounds to move.

“Back inside,” Brandi grunted. She took his blood-slicked arm and dragged him past the warehouse doorframe and into the protection of a shadow cast by the damaged warehouse wall. The effort was almost too much for her, but she managed to swing his legs into shadow as well before her muscles and legs gave out entirely. She threw herself across his body, pressing down on both of his wounds with both of her hands, desperate to staunch the bleeding. It was no use. His strong heart pumped the blood forcefully through his veins and through her fingers.

Brandi’s teary eyes scanned the room, desperate to find something she could use to stop the bleeding. They landed on a heap of wet fabric on the floor, in the corner, under the catwalk. It took her a moment to recognize that there was a body inside the fabric.

It was Dallas. His body so broken it was barely human.

Cringing and nauseous, Brandi averted her eyes. There was no time to think about what had happened to Dallas, her would-be killer and the killer of her sister, at the hands of the Swimmer. There was no time for anything at all but to save the Swimmer, to save him as he had saved her.

“You came back for me. You came back.”

“I heard your voice. I still hear your voice.” He was delirious with pain, losing blood much too quickly, losing consciousness.

Brandi hobbled out of the warehouse and around the side of the building until she reached the gravel parking lot and Dallas’s truck. The engine was still running. She thought for a moment that she could drive the truck through the damaged wall of the warehouse, that she could drive the Swimmer to safety. But she would never be able to get him into the truck alone.

Dallas’s radio crackled to life.

“Dallas, it’s Conrad, pick up. Pick up, dammit.”

Brandi squealed with relief as she ripped the radio from the dash. “Dad?”

“Brandi! Where are you, baby? Are you all right?” His voice was as full of relief as her own.

“The warehouse. The fire… I’m safe, but please come quickly. Please hurry.”

“I’m coming, baby! You’re with Dallas?”

She slumped in the seat, feeling faint. She managed enough energy to bring the radio to her mouth one last time. “Bring an ambulance. Black cloth to cover the windows.”

“Black cloth? Baby, why—”

“Hurry, Daddy.”

Conrad found his daughter passed out in Dallas’s truck. She woke when he carried her to the ambulance and urged him to set her down, insisting that she was fine. It was the man inside the warehouse who needed the ambulance. He was dying, she said. He was
burning
. She tried to fight her way free of her father’s arms, but he held on tight and passed her off to a paramedic. Once she was safely strapped down to a gurney, he headed inside the building expecting to find an injured Dallas. He saw what was left of his young deputy, but before it fully registered what he was looking at, he heard soft groans from another man, lying naked against the wall, the shadow around him slowly shrinking as the sun rose higher and filled more of the room with light. He had never seen the Swimmer’s face in the medical clinic, wrapped, as it was, in heavy bandages. But he knew immediately that this was the same man.

              It took Conrad and two paramedics to carry the Swimmer from the warehouse to the waiting ambulance, wrapped in an emergency blanket. When the sun struck his exposed skin, he writhed violently in their arms. They managed to hold on and found space for him on the ambulance floor, below Brandi’s gurney. One of the paramedics went to work on the bullet wounds while the other climbed into the front seat and turned over the ambulance’s engine. Brandi leaned over the edge and reached for the Swimmer’s hand, her fingers barely reaching his. The touch they shared was so gentle, so intimate, it brought tears to Conrad’s eyes. He had indeed blocked off the ambulance’s window with black cloth, just as Brandi begged him to do, and it shielded the Swimmer from further exposure to the light.

Conrad waved goodbye to Brandi. “I love you baby,” he said, his voice quavering. He slammed shut the rear doors. The ambulance tore out of the gravel lot and headed back into town.

              Conrad wanted to follow the ambulance, to be with Brandi. But he was drawn back inside the warehouse. He crossed over to Dallas’s body, heaped in the corner. He took in the sight dispassionately, with cold eyes. Dallas should not have been here with Brandi. There was no explanation for it. And it was the Swimmer she had been desperate to save, not Dallas.

             
Conrad spun on his heels and jogged back out of the warehouse, leaving Dallas alone in the building now flooded with late morning light.

EPILOGUE

             
During the week the Swimmer stayed at the medical clinic, the doctors weren’t sure he would survive his injuries. They gave him blood transfusions, and antibiotics to control infection. But his wounds were severe, and his body didn’t respond to traditional medicine as well as they hoped. Rumors swirled about the patient in room 28, rumors about mysterious openings in his neck that fluttered when he drew labored, unconscious breaths. Rumors about the translucent skin between his digits that looked so much like webbing. Could these physical peculiarities explain why his body seemed to reject medications that would have saved the life of any other patient? Privately, the doctors began to make plans for running a host of tests on this most unusual patient, the same tests they had been unable to perform when his first visit at their clinic ended prematurely.

The patient had no family members to contact, no neighboring town authorities to inform of his appearance in Edgewater and current condition. He had only one visitor: Brandi Vine. Sometimes her father would come to the clinic with her, but he always remained in the lobby. No one was courageous enough to ask the sheriff questions about the patient his daughter was so connected to. No one was courageous enough to ask the sheriff about the death of his deputy, whose body had been cremated without an autopsy. It was rumored that he was murdered by drifters out at the warehouse. But rumors don’t always turn into formal investigations and newspaper exposes. Not in small towns. In a place like Edgewater, a mystery can remain a mystery. It was almost a point of pride for the people who whispered about what really happened, that they had such mysteries to keep life interesting. If they suspected that Dallas’s death was connected to Brandy Vine and to the patient in room 28, if they suspected that the drifters who supposedly took the life of their deputy were villains manufactured out of thin air, no one said it out loud. Not within Conrad’s hearing.